The New Journalists

Jacob Weisberg And His Talented Peers Are Becoming The Dominant Voices In The Small, Insular World Of New York And Washington Magazines

July 26, 1996|By Paul Galloway, Tribune Staff Writer.

If you follow the American magazine scene, you're familiar with the name of Jacob Weisberg, the keynote speaker this weekend at the Newberry Library's annual book fair and a participant in its Bughouse Square Debates.

You're aware that he's a top-flight, high-profile writer who spent several years at the New Republic, the Washington-based journal of liberal opinion, and that he's now at New York magazine, which he joined two years ago as its national political columnist.

You also might know that he has recently written his first book, "In Defense of Government: The Fall and Rise of Public Trust" (Scribner), and that he was born in Chicago and grew up here.

The world Weisberg moves in is the arcane one of big-time journalism as conducted in the only arenas of the magazine game that really count--New York City and Washington.

At age 31, Weisberg is one of the youngest members of a particularly influential group of talented magazine writers who are widely regarded as the heirs of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, David Halberstam and other vaunted practitioners of what was known in the 1960s and '70s as the New Journalism--and yet who are very different from them.

Indeed, while expressing admiration for these icons of yesterday, most of whom are in their 60s and no longer contribute to magazines, today's younger cohorts are moving in a different direction.

Whereas Talese penned famous profiles of Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra, the new bunch tends to scrutinize subjects such as welfare reform and national defense.

"The earlier group was about writing, and the new group is about ideas," says Dan Okrent, the managing editor of Life magazine. "When you think of Wolfe or Halberstam--those guys would never want to write op-ed columns or get into ideology the way the contemporary group does."

David Abrahamson, associate professor of journalism at Northwestern University, agrees. "With the New Journalists, there was a greater emphasis on language. I think of Norman Mailer, Michael Herr and Garry Wills as well as Wolfe and Talese; they were far more experimental with language and form than today's writers.

"With the new group, there's a greater emphasis on the substance of public policy. They all believe in ways that the older generation didn't that government is important and a means to make the country better."

Norman Sims, chairman of the journalism department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of two books on literary journalism, applauds the new writers for applying the storytelling techniques of the New Journalists, whom he considered "social and cultural reporters," to magazine pieces about foreign relations or political fund-raising.

"The challenge that many of them have mastered has been to bring literary skill to bear on complicated social issues," Sims says.

`Built on idealism'

"We are much more straightforward and less preoccupied with style," Weisberg says. "We write out of a skeptical liberalism and a political orientation, putting an emphasis on empiricism in our reporting. We are tough-minded, and even though our writing may be caustic at times, it's often softened by humor and always built on idealism. Our ultimate goal is to figure out how to make government work better."

The New Journalists were chiefly showcased in Esquire, Harper's and New York. Most of their putative progeny can be found at The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly and the three main newsmagazines.

It's interesting to observe that three of the above have accepted editorships recently. Kelly, 39, leaves The New Yorker to head The New Republic; Fallows, 46, goes from the Atlantic Monthly to the helm of U.S. News & World Report; and Kinsley, 45, has moved from free-lancing and CNN to Slate, an insistently ballyhooed computer magazine he founded for Microsoft.

What is perhaps most striking, and troubling, about this elite list of gifted journalists--in addition to the fact that all but one are men--is the group's insularity.

Remnick and Kelly are the only ones who served any appreciable time as newspaper reporters, and Remnick is alone in never having toiled for The New Republic or The Washington Monthly.

Many, if not most, Weisberg among them, have gone directly from their Ivy League universities to the aforementioned mags.

Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief and owner of The New Republic, recruits almost exclusively from Harvard, where he lectures, while Charles Peters, founder and editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly, will occasionally reach out to Yale, Weisberg's alma mater.